Last week, Netflix released a feature-length documentary about Noah Kahan called Out of Body. Over its 90 minutes, we learn that the 29-year-old Stick Season singer-songwriter is a worrier – about his weight, his career, his parents – and prefers his home state of Vermont to his new home in Nashville. He is self-deprecating, likable and perhaps not someone you can make a 90-minute documentary about at this stage of their career without recourse to padding.
That someone has tried says a lot about Kahan’s vertiginous rise over the last three years, a firm rebuttal to the idea that the privations of lockdown had changed the face of pop: that listeners were now after glitzy escapism rather than the dressed-down, earnest introspection of the post-Ed Sheeran troubadours this newspaper dubbed “the ordinary boys”. In fact, a new wave of dressed-down introspection was about to become a thing: Myles Smith is playing arenas, Alex Warren’s single Ordinary spent 13 weeks at No 1; Teddy Swims’ I’ve Tried Everything Except Therapy spent more than two years in the UK album chart. And the biggest thing of all is Kahan, who used to introduce himself on stage as “the Jewish Ed Sheeran”, has a thing for the stomp-clap rhythms of Mumford & Sons and stirs a little heartland rock – Springsteen via Sam Fender – into his sound. He was catapulted to success by Stick Season in 2022: a sweet, sad shiver of autumnal wistfulness written from the perspective of someone left behind in their home town when their friends and ex-girlfriend head off to university. It sold 10m copies, the first of eight huge hits from an album of the same name.
The question that clearly vexes Kahan during Out of Body is whether success on that scale is sustainable, or unrepeatable. You can tell it’s been on his mind just by listening to his fourth album, The Great Divide, a record that deals in consolidation rather than development. The National’s Aaron Dessner co-produces – you can spot his touch immediately, in the opening lambent piano figure and misty ambience – but it sticks pretty close to the musical blueprint established on its predecessor: a little less Mumford, a little more heartland rock, perhaps, but you really have to think about it to work out the differences.
If the autumnal qualities of Stick Season were to your liking, it opens with a song called End of August and comes in a sleeve in which bare trees figure heavily. If you identified with Stick Season’s small-town narrator, there are plenty more like him on The Great Divide, among them the couple in Paid Time Off – “someone said there’s a world out there, but we don’t care to drive that far” – and the protagonist of Downfall who greets his partner’s new haircut with the suspicious observation that it makes her “look quite Californian”, and, when she duly departs, snaps “call me when it turns to shit”. Dashboard counsels against the belief that “crossing state lines” can change someone completely (“you’re an asshole after all”). Kahan tends to discuss his own success in terms of how folks back home think about it: “Some small fame ain’t made me someone else”; “I’m betting on the north to drag my ass back down to earth.”
Of course, this isn’t really a problem in itself: plenty of artists in Kahan’s position have declined to fix what doesn’t seem to be broken, and besides, he’s good at what he does, even if what he does seems to come with self-imposed limitations. There’s a sweet melody even on the raging Deny Deny Deny, while as a lyricist, he’s got a good eye for detail, avoiding the blustery generalities to which his peers are sometimes prone.
The issue with The Great Divide is that there’s an awful lot of what he does here: 17 tracks, its length suggestive not of the desire to make a grand statement, but uncertainty about where to edit. (He could have started with Headed North, which is essentially Stick Season 2.0.) An album that long, with no drastic variation in approach, is almost guaranteed to sag in the middle, and so it proves. Your attention wanders long before Dan draws things to a conclusion, with a tastefully understated sing-along chorus.
Perhaps that doesn’t matter, some excess fat being easier to overlook in the playlist era, when listening to an album from start to finish is supposedly a dying art. You wouldn’t bank on The Great Divide failing, but nor would you bank on it replicating Stick Season’s success, and perhaps that doesn’t matter either. Watching Out of Body, you wonder if Kahan might not be happier if things calmed down, and he was left to hone his small-town vignettes – and possibly take a few more risks – without the weight of vast expectation.
This week Alexis listened to
Sofia Isella – Numbers 13:17-18
Isella’s new EP Something Is a Shell is a treat, albeit a dark one: righteously angry, disturbing and, occasionally, hilarious; freighted with the influence of industrial rock, with a pure pop core.